Gilet Jaunes / Yellow Jackets

with the news today that the Gilet Jaunes protests have spread to Belgium, with similarly enthusiastic / militant street approach on display, I've been looking around for some insight as to how much right wing / fash involvement there is / how exaggerated it is, what the extent of organised / or autonomous working class involvement is, what the immediate focus /demands are outside of opposition to the diesel / fuel taxes, where it's all going etc.

Decent / basic Counterfire piece below, but anyone with any other pointers / insight, would be interesting to hear.

The following is a collaborative effort of translated analyses from France focused on the Gilets Jaunes movement between Agitations, Carbure, Otto Mattick & Ediciones inéditos. More texts will be translated in the coming days.

I find Dialectical Delinquent to be helpful for aggy stuff in France and I hope they do get a chance to write some reflections on the character of the movement. 'til now they've been cautiously suggesting that the absence of Party/Union leadership leaves the space open for wide participation which includes the far left as well as the fash who have been trying to speak for the movement.

Really grateful for the links, thank you. My take has been very simplistic. BBC has been sympathetic in its coverage, therefore GJ is right wing. Any protest against tax is smiled upon by the Sarah Sands of this world.

Macron, who was attending the G20 summit in Buenos Aires, said he would lead an emergency meeting of senior government ministers after returning to Paris on Sunday morning. He said: “No cause justifies that security forces are attacked, shops pillaged, public or private buildings set on fire, pedestrians or journalists threatened or that the Arc de Triomphe is sullied.”

He said that the peaceful demonstrators – whose name derives from their fluorescent high-visibility jackets and who have been demonstrating against taxes for two weeks – had legitimate concerns and he would hear their anger. But he said their demonstrations across the country on Saturday had been infiltrated by violent rioters who would be brought to trial in court.

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In two paragraphs, the liberal position that rioting never makes a difference, why that's bollocks, and their favourite method of trying to discredit its legitimacy. Quite efficient writing from the Graun there really.

50 years since '68 and it seems the traditional blocs of France are not yet able to fit these protests in their established grand scheme thinking of things. The involment of the banlieue and their sentiments is an anomaly that seems to hard to assimilate for them from what i have read.

there have been big riots in the recent past in France, but it can't be stressed enough that the violence yesterday was on an unparalleled scale. the CRS/ police completely lost control, with barricades, car torchings, looting and violence all over central Paris. its really hard to get a sense of numbers, but the initial scenes around the Arc de Triumphe only involved maybe 1000 gilet jaunes, but the CRS were completely unable (or unwilling?) to deal with them. my sense was that for the CRS, their heart wasn't in it. that spells huge trouble for Macron. more joined as the afternoon wore on. figures suggest around 8000 in Paris in total.

in terms of who's making up the numbers, this isn't a left protest but its not a far right protest either. its not entirely a-political but it maybe wishes to be - this is what makes it so dangerous to Macron. he's gifted an issue which unites all the disgruntled under a single banner (or gilet). trade unionists and communists were asked to leave one protest in Normandy, but the objection appears to have been their insistence on introducing union/ party flags and banners etc. there is certainly far right involvement, but maybe more their voters than their activists. there is no far right symbols, only the occasional french flag. yesterday appears to have drawn anarchists and insurrectionists. what the protests are, overwhelmingly, however is provincial. this is not a Parisian movement, or an urban movement. that means the protests are fairly white, but not entirely so by any means. this means there was rioting and disturbances in some pretty unexpected places: Tours for example. that in turn means that Paris can't simply be swamped with provincial Police/CRS.

it will be over to Macron now. the authorities will surely be telling him that they cannot contain this.

It is in this France périphérique that the gilets jaunes movement was born. It is also in these peripheral regions that the western populist wave has its source. Peripheral America brought Trump to the White House. Peripheral Italy – mezzogiorno, rural areas and small northern industrial towns – is the source of its populist wave. This protest is carried out by the classes who, in days gone by, were once the key reference point for a political and intellectual world that has forgotten them.

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At the same time, economic and land logics have locked up the elite world. This confinement is not only geographical but also intellectual. The globalised metropolises are the new citadels of the 21st century – rich and unequal, where even the former lower-middle class no longer has a place. Instead, large global cities work on a dual dynamic: gentrification and immigration. This is the paradox: the open society results in a world increasingly closed to the majority of working people.

If you live in Paris you probably don't own a car, so at least the fuel protest element doesn't have direct relevance until you get far enough away that you need one.

What do you think about this in comparison to the 'Karcher' riots?

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It's hard to compare. The 2005 situation continued over several weeks across the whole of France. The worst of those incidents were more sporadic hit and run arson attacks than the more traditional rioting which we saw yesterday. There were no buildings burnt down yesterday and no deaths. So 2005 was certainly worse in that sense (although there have been 3 deaths outside of Paris since this started).

The 2005 incidents generally took place in areas the Police have limited control over at the best of times. What made yesterday perhaps more shocking or certainly surprising was that it was in the very centre, it went on for hours and the Police seemed to retreat or were incapable or unwilling to respond. Considering trouble was fully expected, that still surprises me. There has been nothing quite like this in the centre of Paris for a long, long time. Possibly 1968. At the end of big marches you always have a set piece ruck between the CRS and the hundred or so stragglers, drunks and those who came to fight, but these are set piece affairs, almost ritualistic, and whilst there's always tear gas , broken bottles etc, and a sense of disorder, the Police are in truth fully in control. This was not the case at all yesterday.

There's translations from French of a mix of positions across the anti-authoritarian left here.

I haven't read through them all yet, but I was quite amused by this; "Everything that moves is red, any anger is revolutionary and you can make chocolate cakes with the leftovers of a zucchini gratin."